The ultimate B-Boy alchemist, Eddie Otchere's photography is rooted in the art of darkroom printing. A graduate of the London College of Printing and founder of The Brightrooms...

SHOOT

You shoot first and ask questions later. The beauty of photography is the truth. A lot of what informs me is what happens as it happens and how people hold themselves up or rather hold it down.

print

It's not just an eye for a shot, but my commitment to traditional photography. Using bespoke film stocks, unusual papers, lith developers, rare cameras and drum scanners.

workshops

Since 2007 more people live in cities than in rural areas. The city, it's urbanism and population is reflected heavilly in my photography. To flaneur and become the hidden camera is as much a part of my art.

Hip Hop Testament...

In its infancy Hip Hop took host in the minds of the most minimal of the masses; the young, disenfranchised and poor urban youths. It taught them to celebrate intellect, art, dance and, importantly, their humanity, all of which they had no consciousness of. In Hip Hop, the youth explored components of human activity and used them to define themselves.

The camera, the negative and the print are the photographer’s tools and time - two decades in my case - is the master. Having photographed hundreds of legends it is time that offers us insight into our Hip Hop heroes and their abilities to manifest their destinies. These Icons are canonised on film and immortalised in print. I chose to seek audiences with artists whose depth of skill deserved representation. With each Icon I photographed, I wanted to reflect their natural beauty while in no way troubling them with the burden of representation.

OTCHERE X WU-TANG CLAN

More than the sum of the parts, more than a sectrillion rotating galaxies in the night sky, the elemental forces that is both life and form and the life we in turn form becomes so much more than the sum of it’s parts. The Wu Tang Clan.

A silent witness observing and contextualising....

Photography is about recording. It’s about searching and capturing but leaving the scene unperturbed. It’s about time, exposure time and immortality in time, it’s about the star we call the sun radiating and casting shadows. Photography is casting shadows on paper, cooked in waters and chemicals. It’s about this planet and your relationship to it.

Bass Driven Gods...

During my college days I wrote a novel about the emergence of Jungle music in London. Somewhere between the cracks of a failing conservative government, groups of us – youngsters – started building a sound based on the raves where we experience absolute freedom, and reggae, which gave spiritual awareness. Hip Hop joined in and began bringing B-Boying into the mix and between a few promoters/dealers we began gathering and dancing and doing our own thing. By 1994 when ‘The Junglist’ came out, the culture was in full swing and like all good things was ready to go pop. What began as a melting pot started to become a cliché and out of that Goldie emerged as the bass driven God with a fresh propane fuelled attitude. Being an original school B-Boy he brought to it a posse and I became a part of the Metalheadz crew. I was his club photographer, documenting his seminal club nights. It is my hope to produce a book about those years because it’s been the template for most all the sonic sub cultures in Britain.

FATBOY SLIM

THEO PARRISH

APHEX TWIN

TRICKY

An immersive exhibition of Eddie Otchere’s iconic portraits of every member of the Wu Tang Clan during their most prolific years. Photographed over the course of 5 years and never exhibited in their entirety before. The prints have been digitally reduxed by 90‘s master printer Danny Pope. The show opens with a Tribute mix by Dj Rumz, features a sonic video installation by Daniel Oduntan and to close the night, a live debut of South London’s best kept secret led by Raf Powell. Come along to share a day and night of revisiting a special time in Hip Hop culture. Entry is of course, free for all.